Since Google’s Penguin update hit with a bang in 2012, the SEO approach to outreach has changed significantly. The ‘create great content’ message that Google had been pushing for a long time finally began to materialise, as people in the SEO industry switched focus onto producing content at greater volumes for clients and campaigns.

This is where a bit of a problem can emerge though. It’s all well and good creating content that should appeal to your audience, or content which is well designed, but when it comes to content marketing and using content to attract links and shares online, you need a hook or an angle. Why would someone share your content? Who will link to this?

The convergence of SEO and PR

There’s a good set of slides that Pete Campbell presented recently, explaining how PR tactics have improved his content marketing. There’s a lot of things we as SEOs can learn from the way PR has been done since before ‘link building’ was even a thing, particularly crafting a story that will interest your audience, and then ‘selling that story in’ to the people you want to share it.

The main secret is having a hook. An angle. A reason for people to care.

No matter how good your content is, you always need a good trending hook to get the best returns. Spending ages on a piece of stock content without a wider public interest in the subject matter is a wasted effort.

This is an approach I’ve been very keen on for a while now. When working with clients, we have to be mindful of budgets, expectations, and overall KPIs. As SEOs, we can’t spend the entire month’s budget on something we hope will perform well online. We need assurances. We need to maximise our chances of it performing as well as possible. This is why the hook is so important.

The Hook

Scenario A:

It’s Tuesday morning. Your client is an online DIY retailer, and you’ve decided to create a piece of content around workplace safety, which ties in perfectly to the range of safety equipment your client offers. You figure you’ll publish the piece sometime next week, and it has strong potential to outreach to health & safety websites, DIY bloggers, and others.

This all looks good in theory. There is clear relevance to the client, and there is an obvious target audience to promote to. But is that enough?

Scenario B:

Exactly the same as scenario A, however this time, you have identified that it’s National Workplace Safety Awareness Day next week.

Bingo. You have your hook.

Hi Jerry,
As it's National Workplace Safety Awareness Day coming up on Thursday, I thought I'd send over this guide we have just published around workplace safety regulations...

Taking the approach in this scenario, you are adding value to a topic of relevance that they are likely going to be talking about already (providing you have done your homework).

Putting it bluntly, having the right idea and a clear target audience isn’t always enough. You need that little bit extra to ensure you have the best chance of being successful with your content.

In keeping with the example above, the piece of content from scenario A may have been sufficient enough to get a bunch of links and shares from relevant people on the web. Wouldn’t you want that extra piece of security though? The extra reason why someone might care about your content, and might want to share it with their own networks?

To make your content work, you obviously have to have a strong idea. But that strong idea can be amplified considerably if you are able to find an additional reason or cause for people to care.

The process in action

Two weeks ago in Berlin we picked up an EU Search Award in the Best Use of PR in a Search Campaign category. This was reward for our work in the summer of last year, commemorating 100 years since the start of World War 1.

We started out in advance by having a topic (WW1), and we had a clear idea of the audience(s) we wanted to target. For the idea, we decided on a colourised set of images, taken from black-and-white archives between 1914-1918.

We were extremely confident of our content idea and the approach we were taking, but the key driver behind the success of this campaign was the hook – 100 years since WW1. This was an event that we knew would have wide-spread interest across the history websites/blogs we were targeting, but also in the press worldwide.

During outreach, we opened with a clear reason for people to care. It was 100 years since the war, and we had unearthed a series of rare photos – with added colour – to commemorate the occasion.

This resulted in links to our piece in 21 countries, and over 100 pieces of international coverage.

Adding value to the conversation

The biggest shortcut you can have in terms of content marketing is when you are adding genuine value to a conversation that is already happening, or one which is about to begin.

It can be extremely difficult to encourage someone to promote a piece of content completely out of the blue. If you tie in the topic to their existing content agenda, then you are going to improve your chances ten-fold. The key is to stay aligned to the conversation. Understand what’s happening and when. Identify the topics of relevance and how you can genuinely contribute.

Build it and they will come?

I really dislike the stance that some marketers take when it comes to content promotion—build great content and links will come.

Unfortunately this is something that does tend to happen quite frequently. A lot of man hours goes into producing beautifully functional content, but then there’s been a clear disconnect in the amplification side of things.

Common mistakes include:

A) Having an undefined idea of who the content is targetingB) Being too aggressive in asking people to share contentC) Spending too little (or zero) time on actual amplificationD) A combination of the above

Amplification is necessary if you want your content to perform to its maximum ability. Unless you are publishing to an extremely popular site or platform, you should be looking to find relevant people within your audience to share your work with.

Having the right hook can ensure you improve your results even further.

If you’re in the active business of creating content for the purpose of gaining shares/links, are you asking yourself this question enough: Who will link to this?

Going back as recently as 3-4 years ago, link building services were at a high, because building links at scale was easy. People would buy 200 directory submissions here, spin the text of a couple of articles over there, and along with a few other less-than-white-hat tactics, you had high quantities of links to show your client on the first of the month.

That’s changed quite considerably these days. The stop-gap in-between mass web spam and the sudden daunting reality that is modern-day SEO, was the ‘boom’ of guest posting and infographics that dominated the last few years.

The problem seems to be that the industry is working at the extreme ends of the spectrum. Suddenly the directory submissions and guest posts aren’t as effective (and are even harmful to a site), and the amount of “link building is dead” articles begin to creep out of the woodwork (not helped by sensationalist headlines).

Link building isn’t dead, it’s just most of the old ‘tactics’ don’t work anymore.

Content for links?

Content is undoubtedly the best way to build genuine links (at scale) in 2015 and beyond, but with that becomes difficulties. What we now see is endless new pieces of content being created around topics that people think will go ‘viral’ and get them lots of links, but in most cases, don’t.

If you read articles around content marketing or listen to podcasts (such as This Old Marketing – which I love, for the record) the focus is very much on content strategy, and creating the most applicable content for your audience. But what about amplification and seeding?

Never-fail content promotion

One of my favourite SEO articles is by Richard Baxter on the Built Visible (formally SEO Gadget) blog. Richard talks about big content promotion and his team’s mantra of ensuring content is a success in terms of it’s goals.

To borrow Richard’s example:

You’ve had that “great” idea, everyone in the room agreed to it, you got the research done, you hired a designer, you hired a developer and everything looks great. The big day comes, it’s time to go live, to publish your work.

You click “publish”, and, nothing.

The solution Richard outlines is a great process for publishing content, but keeping your SEO hat on, the core question should simply be: who will link to this?

If you are planning a piece of content to encourage links and shares, then you shouldn’t be blindly doing so without doing your due-diligence.

Can you quickly find 10 websites or blogs that would be interested in sharing your piece of content-in-the-making? If the answer isn’t an emphatic ‘yes’, then it could be a sign that your piece of content isn’t going to do very well in terms of outreach when you’re trying to gain coverage.

Do your research. Analyse what people are sharing. Speak to potential target sites. See how well similar content has done in the past.

For The Open University, we at Huskies recently produced a piece of content to celebrate 30 years since the first dot-com domain name. We had identified a clear topical opportunity in advance with relevance to our goals. Before we created anything, we did our due diligence and made sure we had identified (and spoken to) the people who would be interested.

This worked really well to get us shares (and links) above the noise of lots of other news/content that was being published by other brands across the web.

We can do better

Not all pieces of content that we create will be successful, and some will completely fail. There are steps we should be taking as an industry to produce the best possible ideas and content though, and not just publishing things for the sake of it.

I needed a way of exporting the email messages from Gmail to Excel CSV format recently, and there’s a lot of random (and confusing) solutions listed online, so thought I’d blog about the one that actually worked for me.

It’s all pretty straight forward – here’s how.

Step 1: Download & Install Thunderbird

Hop over to the Mozilla website and download the email client Thunderbird. Once you’ve installed it, open up the program and head to step two.

Step 2: Add Gmail Account to Thunderbird

Once you have Thunderbird open, select the option to add a new account and enter your Gmail credentials. Thunderbird should automatically detect the default Gmail settings, giving you the option to select either IMAP or POP3. For the purposes of this, I selected POP3 (to store emails on my computer), then clicked the ‘Done’ option to finalise.

Step 3: Import Gmail Messages

Next up, click the ‘Get Mail’ option in Thunderbird to import the email messages from Gmail.

Step 4: Install Import/Export Addon for Thunderbird

As Thunderbird doesn’t offer the export to CSV functionality as standard, you’ll need to grab this import/export addon which will do the trick. Download and install the addon.

Step 5: Download Gmail Mails as Excel CSV

You can now select multiple emails within Thunderbird (hold CTRL and click in Windows for multiple selections). Once you have selected the messages you want to export to Excel CSV, simply right click and select the ‘Save selected messages’ option, then ‘Spreadsheet (CSV)’.

This should do the trick, with your selected Gmail messages appearing as seperate rows within an Excel CSV file (downloaded to the destination you chose).

I spotted this afternoon that Rhys was selling a few of his domains and it reminded me that I have a few knocking around that I’m happy to let go.

Below is the list of domains I’m looking to sell on, along with their approx. monthly search volume (taken via the Google AdWords Keyword Tool). None of the domains have any history in terms of having websites on them, as they’ve kind of just been sitting around in my 123-reg account. Drop me an email (kieronhughes[at]gmail[dot]com) if you’re interested!

Last week I was reading Chuck Palahniuk’s AMA on reddit and one particular answer struck me. The question posed to Chuck was (to paraphrase), “What offends you?”, to which he responded:

What offends me? Waste offends me, or great ideas that never get developed. I want to steal from every writer I meet who shares a brilliant idea that he or she will never complete.

As I looked through my domain list on 123-reg this morning, that quote struck a chord. I have 20 registered domain names, down from around 35 about 6 months ago. The amount of sites that sit live on them? One. This blog. And that wasn’t even live until today.